An Anti-Inspirational Guide to Adulthood

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Want to send that new grad out there with a feel for what’s really waiting? Give him/her a copy of Sarah Montague’s You Can Be Anything! From A to Z. An Anti-Inspirational Guide to Adulthood. They’re all pretty good but here’s a couple of my favorites:

Fiona is a Failure. Her husband left her for a younger woman. She wasn’t good enough at making him happy and she wasn’t pretty enough to make him stay. Are you good enough so people won’t leave you?! (I hope so!)

Zeke is a Zookeeper. He works forty hours plus overtime at the zoo. He is very quiet and keeps to himself. The thinks the animals speak to him in a secret language. Like when the monkeys throw their feces, they might be saying, “Zeke, we like you best!” Do you like animals?

Everybody on the Web is famous to 15 people

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In an interview on Tom Peters’ website, David Weinberger, author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web and coauthor of The Cluetrain Manifesto, offers the following on Weblogs:

“If you browse randomly through these 500,000 to a million Weblogs, most of them that you come across will be uninteresting to you. But, so what? It’s not that everybody on the Web is famous for 15 minutes. It’s that everybody on the Web is famous to 15 people.”

We are immune to advertising (Cluetrain Manifesto)

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“The only advertising that was ever really effective was word of mouth, which is nothing more than conversation.” Just read The Cluetrain Manifesto. Oh my. I don’t know where to begin. Maybe a few more quotes.

“The memo is dead. Long live e-mail.” At our company, senior management insists on emailing company-wide memos as Word attachments. Search me.

“Suppose you removed the table from your conference room and replaced the seats with armchairs. Suppose you turned it into a living room. How much would this affect your meetings? That’s how much your meetings are about power, not communication.”

“How will we be smart in a world where it’s easier to look something up than to know it?”

The last management book I read was The Dilbert Principle. I thought it was the last I’d need. But that’s misleading. Cluetrain is not a management book. It’s… well, it’s about the Web. “Our longing for the Web is rooted in the deep resentment we feel toward being managed. However much we long for the Web is how much we hate our job.”

The first eighteen years

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I started working for Clyde Lear in May, 1984. My second job in 30 years. Clyde Lear and Bob Priddy are easily two of the nicest and most talented people I’ve ever met. I’m reminded of the character in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 who played horseshoes all day. He hated the game and it made the day (and his life) seem longer. I’m having way too much fun and it’s going way too fast. One more movie reference comes to mind. In Broadcast News, William Hurt asks Albert Brooks, “What do you do when your real life exceeds your dreams?” Brooks: “Keep it to yourself.”